Arigato!

The young have raised a banner above all other flags. Those who mistrust the young think of it as the Jolly Roger, an ensign under which all sorts of piratical and subversive acts of depredation may be committed. Those who esteem the young see their symbolic banner as an emblem revitalizing a tired phrase and an undying hope: the brotherhood of man. If the phrase means anything, it must mean that man's vision should extend to the horizon of his being and not be blinkered by some arbitrary national line squiggled on a map. This is the shaping theme of an attractive and exuberant free-form musical from Japan currently playing off-Broadway.

Called Golden Bat, the show has eye appeal, heart appeal and sense appeal. Its basic credo is far from unfamiliar. The staged ideas of the young have become almost a tarnished currency since the night Hair opened. Stop the war in Viet Nam. Be mighty free in speech. Struggle for your own identity. Strip to the buff and make love. It is the way the Golden Bat company illuminates this standard apolitical platform that makes all the difference. In this show the nude love scene is erotic, but the lovers are more tellingly naked in their tenderness.

Distilled Beauty. In another scene, a bird of a girl whirls about the stage, writhes in the anguish of birth throes and then spits out the words "I hate my mother." In that moment we relearn something touching and powerful about the desperate need of the young to define themselves and to cut the anchor chains of family if they are to make voyages of their own. The show is replete with instances of insight.

This would count for little if Golden Bat were not persistently entertaining and deftly professional. The company, all aged 25 or under, was formed two years ago as an underground theater group calling itself The Tokyo Kid Brothers, and is now designated as the La Mama Tokyo troupe. English is slightly favored over Japanese as the language of the evening, but each tongue is like a quick-change costume donned for the humor of it. Some of the speech-solo numbers could stand cutting. However, one of these speech solos, delivered with exquisite intensity by Shoichi Saito, contains the distilled beauty and pain of love as a man simply tells how he cared greatly for a girl, left her, and then wrote her a letter.

The show's many dance numbers are mesmeric revels. The cast is totally winning, and so are the demon drummer and his galvanizing group up behind the scrim. In midsummer New York, Golden Bat is a surprising tonic for which one can only say arigato.

-T. E. Kalem

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